You are here

Announcements

Please do not use Photobucket to host your images on this site. They will not appear for other users but instead will give an error image and a directive to go to:http://photobucket.com/p500/
For these images to show up it would require us to pay a premium account fee of $399.00 USD/year or our users to set up paid accounts of $99/year for this service to view these images.
We will be removing all linked images to that site and we suggest you use https://imgur.com/ or other similar site instead.

Watch this space for important information on planned twitch streams, updates and more

Stalemates

So one thing that remember in the bit I PvP'd in CoH was that the zones were prone to stalemating. That is fighting that ended up with fronts that barely moved, either on purpose or by accident. Like camping the enemy's spawn areas or when zone objectives ended up impossible to capture .

And Stalemates? They're boring. There's no progress, and if you're at a disadvantage, there's no respite as the enemy can just choose to lock down the zone in a stalemate wherever they feel like.

Compare this to a game like Team Fortress 2. TF2 absolutely HATES stalemates. It does all it can to make sure that the rounds end with a winner and then reset it to start over. You can end some games in less than a minute with a very aggressive push at times. That means he game stays fresher as you might have lost, but there's a new round and a new chance.

But TF2 is a team-based FPS and this is an MMO, so not everything can be copied, nor should it be. However, stalemate avoidance should be one of the things taken into consideration.

For an MMO, I'd imagine a setup like this could be a good starting point:
- Make PvP objective based by default. (Deathmatch can be handled in an arena.)
- De-emphasize the value of killing enemies, unless it happens near an objective.
- The more objectives a side has completed, the easier it becomes for them to get the remaining ones. (This is to encourage the round to end faster.)
- Give out rewards for completing objectives.
- Give out rewards to both teams for finishing a "round" or similar. This is to encourage the losing side to play another round even though they lost.)

As for deliberately holding up the game, I can think of a fairly blunt force way to counter that:
- Each time a player is defeated without the enemy making progress in the objectives, or him getting kills himself, he gains a global buff. It stacks with itself.

So if the same guy is killed over and over, but the battle isn't moving, well... he'll be able to make an Ubercharge style push to break the stalemate. Again, encouraging the winning team to seal the deal before the enemy gets too powerful.

But to boil it down to some very basic rules:
1. The game must encourage winning.
2. The game must reset to a neutral state as often as possible.
3. The game must discourage stalling.

If it does this, then I might be willing to try out City of titans PP. If it's just the same-old? Eh, I'll ignore it.

One of the main things TF2 does to shift things in favor of one side or the other is that the closer to victory one side is, the more the respawn timers swing in their favor.

Yup, and in capture point matches, the last capture point takes about a quarter of the time to capture as the middle one. A crafty Scout can capture that in a few seconds.

Payload moves the spawn points along the track, too, so when you get the bomb far enough ahead, you get a better spawn location, preventing the defending team from undoing the progress made to this point. Again, forcing the defending team to step it up or lose soon.

Basically, the game really wants someone to win, so it can reset back to neutral. I suspect this is also in part due to how players rotate in and out of servers. It's no fun to enter into a stagnated battle, or one you have no chance of winning, so the game wants to reset so new players can get in on the action fast.

MMOs are different, of course, but TF2 could probably be worth looking at if the goal is simple, approachable and casual friendly PvP. Because, well, it's what TF2 does. Also hats.

Not the only one Jay. I like the idea that the enemy is dug in and we need to think of a new way to dig him out. This can get tedious though as it will often result in 'If we only had a (fill in the blank) this would be much easier. Kind of like the old days of CoX when everyone would yell 'Need Rad to debuff a Boss for me!'

What about people running? That was such a complaint in CoH PvP that travel suppression was added. Which no one liked. That's also a kind of stalemate. No one is making any progress since breaking away if the optimal tactic in a kill or be killed game. Making achieving or defending objectives the meat of the game, and people will have a reason to stick around.

I suppose anti-Stalemate features are meant to reduce the risk of frustrating the more casual PvP'ers. I mean all hardcore PvP needs is a symmetrical area and two or more decked out players to fight each other. But that will never reach critical mass. You need a bunch of happy casual players to hit that.

Also I don't like the word "need" in MMOs. That means someone took the lazy way out and made a trinity-like setup.

One of the main things TF2 does to shift things in favor of one side or the other is that the closer to victory one side is, the more the respawn timers swing in their favor.

That's not completely true. In King of the Hill, spawn timers actually become faster for the team that doesn't have control over the point.

Stalemates are actually very common in competitive TF2. The difference between TF2 stalemates and CoH zone PvP stalemates was that CoH zone pvp stalemates happened for these two reasons:

Reason 1: No objectives. If one side was "winning", they just ended up camping the other side's base, because there really wasn't anything else to do.

Reason 2: People didn't know how to play the game. Like I said in that manifesto I posted in the other thread, most people had absolutely no idea what they were doing in terms of PvP. Most "hardcore" PvPers were absolutely terrible at PvP, especially in PvP zones. No doubt there are some hardcore zone PvPers who might read this and take offense. It's not that I'm taking a shot at you, though. You might be a great person, someone I'd love to hang out with - the only thing I'm calling into question is your ability to PvP in very small online superhero game that no longer exists which had a very flawed PvP system in place. Take that for as much as it's worth, and no more.

I can recall several times where we got bored and went into a PvP zone, only to realize our side was getting based camped. It generally took us about 5 minutes to completely reverse the situation and be base camping the other side, regardless of numbers against us, or of travel suppression (travel suppression did make it more annoying, though). This isn't to say "omg we were so good" - it's to say that breaking a hold on a base was very easily possible, given that the players against you were generally really bad at the game and uncoordinated.

The problem with this was, once you did break that hold, the only thing to do was push the other side back to their base, and then camp that side; which brings us back to reason 1: no objectives.

TF2 is still a good comparison though, in that there are many parallels between the community/dev team with CoH - some good, and some bad.

I guess what I mean is .. any duel should be on equal footing. I am all for build equality.

The difference (and reason for PvP IMHO) is team battles. The game strives to have balance and this means there SHOULD be many cases of players feeling evenly matched. If one team has better teamwork or tactics then THAT should be the factor most potent.